Seite 40 - ... finished in the most beautiful manner, even to the fresco painting on the ceilings of the rooms, and the colouring of the various marble columns intended to decorate the interior. It encloses a theatre, and magnificent apartments. Had the work been completed, no edifice could ever have been compared with it. It would have surpassed the Temple of Solomon, the Propylaeum of Amasis, the Villa of Adrian, or the Forum of Trajan.

Seite i - Rogger's thesis is his insistence that "national consciousness presupposes extensive exposure to alien ways; it presupposes a class or group of men capable of responding to that exposure; it requires, moreover, the existence of a secular cultural community or an attempt at its formation.

Seite i - Rogger describes this sense of awareness as "a striving for a common identity, character, and culture by the articulate members of a given community," which is "characteristic of a stage of development in which thinking individuals have been able to emerge from anonymity, to seek contact and communication with one another.

Seite 16 - The roofs are shingled and then covered with birch bark or sod. For this reason they often have great fires. Not a month, nor even a week, goes by without some homes — or, if the wind is strong, whole streets — going up in smoke. Several nights while we were there we saw flames rising in three or four places at once. Shortly before our arrival, a third of the city burned down, and we were told that the same thing happened four years earlier. When such disasters occur, the streltsi and special...

Seite i - ... above all, by psychological factors. "In order not to feel inferior before . . . European culture, articulate Russians were forced to develop for themselves a national self in which they could take pride and with which they could identify." Therein these Russians were shaped by Western influence. Their "search for a national identity was not a rejection of Europe; it was itself another aspect of the Westernization of Russian society.

Seite i - National consciousness, being neither the blind reaction of the masses, nor the religious seer's vision of divine election for his people, was particularly the product of the articulate, the educated, the literate portion of society— that is, its most highly Westernized sector. From the very start, this placed upon it a rather definite stamp, and explains why national consciousness did not, and in fact, could not, mean for the men of the eighteenth century a decisive turning away from contact with...